It’s with a huge amount of pleasure and excitement that we’re announcing the Beta 2 release of BP 3.0 today ready for testing and feedback.

BuddyPress 3.0 will be a major milestone release for us and one we’re all really excited about, it’s been a long time coming but finally we are close to releasing the first template pack for BP, this is a completely new ‘theme’ or set of template files and functionality designed to replace bp-legacy which has served us so well since it’s inception way back in the major release of 1.7 where we introduced ‘Theme Compatibility’, and we’re all really eager for any feedback during these beta phases you may grab a copy of our beta1 release here to test with.

Nouveau – as our new template pack has been named – provides an all new clean set of markup files, refactored from the ground up to be semantic and accessible. Styles are re-written and provided as Sass partials for developers if wanting to build out new packs. A lot of core functionality for components has been re-written and re-located to be sourced from include files by component in the template directory which allows even easier access to modify functions by overloading to a new theme or child theme. Our major loops, members, activity etc have been re-factored to run under Backbone for a smooth Ajax experience and indeed all the Javascript functionality is re-written to be far more modular than it was before and has a far better modern feel to it’s structuring.

For the first time we have brought in the Customizer to provide user option choices and a range of layout configurations may be selected. In our initial offering we have provided various layout options for the main BP navigation elements allowing for vertical navs or horizontal, tab effect where suitable. for the component loops such as members, Groups we provide an option to display in a grid layout & at row quantity options or simply as a flat classic list layout.

While we are really excited about Nouveau 3.0 also has many other improvements to offer and you can view a list of all closed tickets for 3.0

As always your feedback and testing is an invaluable part of our releases, helping us to catch any last minute bugs.
You can download the beta release for testing at downloads.wordpress.org and install on a local copy of WordPress ( please remember this is a beta release and should not be run on an active production site). Any issues found can be reported on our Trac by creating a new ticket

If you’re a developer comfortable with SVN you might like to checkout a development copy which you can do from this link patches can be submitted to existing tickets or issues found reported on a new ticket.

Further guidance on contributing to BuddyPress is covered on our Contributor guidelines page in our Codex